Raidrocket RAID cards, which one??

[Mint_Sauce]

I couldn't find my last post about raid cards and search has died for me on OcUK.

Anyway, I'm about to splurge some cash on a proper RAID card and looking at the Rocket Raids I see the 3510 but it mentions having 4 ports. Since I have 5 hard drives (Raid 5), I guess this isn't going to be ok for me and I will have to go for an 8 port version or doesn't it work like that?

http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA/series_3000.htm

I'd like to get a card that's going to increase my write speed dramatically as at the moment with the onboard controller they're taking a while, not nearly as speedy as when I was in Raid 0 with 4 drives!

 

[rpstewart]

The 3000 series cards are pretty good, they've got proper hardware XOR engines so the write speeds should be in well excess of 100MB/s with 5 drives.

If you want a 5 drive array then you'll need an 8 port card, you will have the ability to use the other three ports for more separate drives or if you want to expand the 5 disk array you'll be able to do that on the fly.

 

[marscay]

or you could look at getting a dell perc 5/i off ebay and save a bundle, they're actually rebadged LSI 8408E SAS controllers which work fine with regular SATA drives also.

i've just built one consisting of 4 1TB WD RE2 drives in Raid 5 and get 200mb/s writes and upto 240mb/s reads, they're sustained speeds also